nov 18, 1956 - Nikita Khrushchev addresses the Western block at the Polish embassy in Moscow and declares: "We will bury you". Iconic of an ongoing push back against the West.

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Khrushchev, in contrast, was excess personified: he could be boisterously clownish, belligerently cloying, aggressively insecure. Dignified he never was, and the volatilities of post-Stalin politics were such that he could never be sure of his own authority… threatened with missiles [we] didn’t have (Gaddis 2006, p. 69)

Krushechev first tried this trick in November 1956. Soviet troops were crushing a rebellion in Hungary just as the British, the French, and the Israelis – without informing the Americans – had seized the Suez Canal in an abortive effort to overthrow the anti-colonial Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
On the spur of the moment, with a view to deflecting attention from the bloodbath in Budapest, Khrushchev threatened Britain and France with rocket weapons if they did not immediately withdraw their forces from the canal. They immediately did so, but not in response to Khrushchev’s warning. Eisenhower, furious at not having been consulted, had ordered them to evacuate Suez or face severe economic sanctions. (Gaddis 2006, p. 70).

From 1957 through to 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. (Gaddis 2006, p. 70)

In May 1959, he announced a unilateral moratorium on such experiments…the Americans were about to begin a new round of nuclear tests. (Gaddis 2006 p. 70)

Khrushchev shifted back to his belligerent mode in November, when he gave the US, Great Britain, and France six months to withdraw their troops for the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of western access rights – always a touchy issue after Stalin’s 1948 blockade – to the East Germans…'Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin'." (Gaddis 2006, p. 71)

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